The wide availability of digital cameras, along with the ease and economy they provide with regard to taking pictures, has increased exponentially the number of people taking digital photographs and the number of photographs they take.
One reason people take photographs is to share them with other people. Before the advent of digital camera technology, people would either put photos in albums and share the albums, or have the photos reprinted and give the reprints to friends and family. Now, because a digital photograph is simply a collection of digital bits, the act of sharing digital photos should be easy.
This is not always the case. Several problems exist that impede the easy sharing of digital photographs. A popular means of sharing photographs is via e-mail attachments. While this can be easy, it does require knowledge of computer concepts beyond that of many computer users. It also requires software capable of sending, receiving and displaying the images. Not all available software is user-friendly, nor does all available software display the received images at an optimal resolution. Also, people are wary of e-mail attachments because of the threat of computer viruses. People are apt to take many more digital photographs than film photographs, due to the negligible cost of additional images. While this often makes for better images, it is not feasible to transmit all the images via e-mail due to the file sizes and transmission speeds. Therefore, users must often choose particular images to e-mail, which takes time.
Therefore, sending digital images via e-mail has significant shortcomings. Another method of sharing photographs is uploading the digital images to a server, creating a web page to display the images, and alerting people of the URL for your web page. The drawbacks to this approach are obvious. It requires knowledge of HTML, file transfer protocols, and other advanced topics. In lieu of that, specialized software packages exist which aim to ease the difficulty of creating web pages. These packages often have a steep learning curve or high price, and still do not address the drawback of needing a server to which the images can be uploaded.
While the prior approaches may occasionally serve the purpose of sharing digital images, there exists a need for a technique that allows an easy and straightforward approach to sharing digital images.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.